Our Texas buddy, Michael Sieben and all around great artist, blogs up a show that he and his Okay Mountain comrades put together at the Creative Research Laboratory in Austin, Texas.

Our Texas buddy, Michael Sieben and all around great artist, blogs up a show that he and his Okay Mountain comrades put together at the Creative Research Laboratory in Austin, Texas.

"
It's Gonna Be Everything"
Okay Mountain at the Creative Research Laboratory in Austin, Texas
January 2008

In true form I managed to wait until this show was down before I found the time to sit and work on this blog. For that I apologize. Hopefully if you really wanted to see the show you were able to see it. But if you wanted to see the show and you weren't able to see it then don't be too sad because that's what this blog is all about. And if you didn't see the show and you're cool with that because you totally couldn't care less... well, that's cool too. Just hit the back button now.

Here's how this whole thing happened. Jade Walker who is the Director of the CRL (Creative Research Laboratory) approached Okay Mountain and invited us to show our work in their space. Normally the gallery is reserved for UT (University of Texas) students and faculty but they made an exception for us since almost half of our staff graduated from UT. (We also have a mighty legion of UT students interning at Okay Mountain at any given moment.)

We (Okay Mountain) decided that we wanted to fill the space entirely with new work that had not been exhibited anywhere before. We also decided that we didn't want to exhibit any individual personal work that had not been created specifically for this show. So we sat down and came up with some ideas for a few large scale installations, some videos, and a series of drawing games that each of us were to assign the group. Our hopes were that by working together on all of the projects for the show, we could begin to investigate what the aesthetic of Okay Mountain is as a group. Actually I just made that up. Our hopes were that we could make enough work to fill the space and that we wouldn't get bad reviews.

Okay Mountain lives behind a pinata store and we thought it would be cool if there was a pinata presence in the show.

You have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

Nathan breaking eggs.

Serious artists.

Art photo.

Okay let's get serious now. That means you Justin.

There are photos later in this blog that explain why the pinatas were decapitated. And I'm pretty sure pinata has an accent mark over the 'n' or the 'a' but I don't know how to make that happen with this computer.

Another one of the sculptural installations we worked on was a piece titled: "All of the beers we drank together."

We started saving our beer cans as soon as we found out that we were going to have a show. Hi Tim and Jacob. Cut, cut, cut.

Some of the beer cans had special prizes inside of them like mold and rancid cigarette butts. Nobody said art was easy.

But it's all for the greater good.

Peat. Designer of the "beeramids."

Almost there.

Another part of the show involved painting cardboard

to make it look like plywood in a weird dream or a cartoon.

Everybody paints wood grain differently. Hi Sterling.

Whoah... trip on that.

More trip out.

Technical blueprints.

You get the idea.

Justin designed a sun sculpture.

Don't worry. It did.

There was fishing line attached to the sunglasses that stretched through the building to the restroom door. Anytime the restroom door was opened the sunglasses would raise up. You know, like at that one bar. The Christmas bar.

See that picnic table on the right?

That's the picnic table in Okay Mountain's backyard. We spend a lot of time sitting at that picnic table.

We all decided it should be included in the show. Hi Ryan.

While we were installing we used the table the same way that we use it at the gallery. Eating, drinking, assembling zines, etc. Hi Carlos, hi Ayham.

There was a plastic pig on the table at some point.

Then jump ahead and a bunch of people showed up after we cleaned everything (except the picnic table.)

The performance aspect of the night happened when our interns showed up with tacos for everybody (Thanks Elizabeth and Jacob.) We had Taqueria Chapala (which is right down the street from Okay Mountain) cater the event. So during the opening people got to hang out on our picnic table and drink beer and eat tacos. Just like we do at the gallery all the time. It's that simple.

Justin designed custom Okay Mountain taco wrappers for the occasion.

Dave Bryant was there.

So was T. Paul Hernandez. This is inside the largest beeramid.

Allison was there.

The entrance to the beeramid was not visible unless you walked around to the back of the sculpture. So people would walk behind it and then discover there were people inside. "Hello" they would say. "Hello" we would reply. Then beer.

Skateboarding.

Last photo of the night.

The last 16 photos of this blog were taken by Carlos Rosales-Silva who is the Senior intern at Okay Mountain. This is Carlos.

And his t-shirt collection is nothing short of amazing.

These are installation photographs to help give a better view what the show looked like as a whole.

There are nine of us that co-own and operate Okay Mountain. Nine heads, one mission. Debt.

An example of the drawing games that we assigned each other: "Corkey's: A floppy disk is being passed around with a Microsoft Paint file on it. You must open the document and add to it using Microsoft Paint and then save over the file on the disk and pass along. Corkey goes last."

We let the picnic table collect junk while we were installing and it continued to collect stuff while the show was up. I'm not smart enough to make that sound art smart. Let's just say visual record or something like that.

That's pretty much it. Ultimately our goal for the show was to spend time with each other making stuff and having fun. I think all of us wanted the show to be inviting and warm which is how we hope people feel about Okay Mountain as a gallery.

Thanks go out to Jade Walker for inviting us to show at the CRL. And many thanks to everybody at the CRL that helped us with the installation and de-installation. We really appreciate the opportunity. And thank you for reading and checking out the photos. Unless you're only sitting through this to say something mean. In which case please go hang out on a skateboard message board somewhere.

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

I don't think at this point it needs to be written since the last update to Fecal Face was a long time ago, but...

I, John Trippe, have put this baby Fecal Face to bed. I'm now focusing my efforts on running ECommerce at DLX which I'm very excited about... I guess you can't take skateboarding out of a skateboarder.

It was a great 15 years, and most of that effort can still be found within the site. Click around. There's a lot of content to explore.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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